Lines Against Your Skin
by daysofstorm
Summary: John loves Sherlock's clothes for some very specific reasons.


John loves Sherlock's clothes. They are expensive, they look amazing, they add to the personality Sherlock has created for himself; both the meticulously clothed public figure and the threadbare t-shirt wearing private version. And he knows now that Sherlock is yet another person when he doesn't wear any clothes, but it took years until John learned about that Sherlock.

For a very long time Sherlock's clothes were just that, his clothes; but when Sherlock jumped off that blasted roof they became something else entirely. John found himself confronted not only with a range of experiments, innumerable books and curiosities, all of which ended up in the basement of his new flat, once he managed to find a smaller place which he could afford on his own, but also with his clothes. His clothes had been a problem. John had wondered whether he should give them to Mycroft. To sell them seemed out of the question; it just didn't seem right. In hindsight John wondered whether Sherlock had hoped that he wouldn't, or whether he knew that he couldn't do it, but he had never asked him. And it wasn't just the clothes in his wardrobe. There had been socks and two grey t-shirts in the laundry and Sherlock's blue dressing gown had been lying across the bed when John had returned home for the first time.

John had stared at it for an hour, his heart aching so much that he could barely breathe. He had lost friends in the war and in his life before the army, but it had never been this painful. The only other time when he had missed someone so profoundly had been when his parents had died, and the thought alone made him realize even more what he had lost in Sherlock. He had been more than a friend. He had been his family.

To force himself out of the state he had been in, he had finally sat on the bed and touched it, imagining that it was Sherlock's shoulder he squeezed after he had fallen asleep at the kitchen table. The image didn't hold up, and soon he found himself sobbing into the soft fabric, unashamedly heartbroken in the privacy of Sherlock's bedroom.

The dressing gown had made its way into his new flat as well. He had sometimes worn it, feeling silly because of how much longer it was on him, touching the ground even; but nobody could see him and sometimes he felt Sherlock's presence in it. The rest of his clothes he put in vacuum bags, somehow feeling stupidly guilty knowing that they wouldn't be as neatly pressed as they had been once someone … Sherlock … would take them out again and find them all wrinkled.

It had taken him months to forget about the guilt; but it never really stopped. Somehow Sherlock's clothes in his basement made his absence less complete. On one occasion he went downstairs to look for a book which he was sure he had packed away, and ended up opening a bag with Sherlock's shirts and a pair of trousers. It felt silly, but he held the trousers up and wondered how thin Sherlock had been; how thin and how very breakable. The shirts had been rather tight, and he had sometimes teased Sherlock about it, which had caused him to inhale deeply to refute any kind of criticism on his person, making it much worse – much to John's delight.

John had taken one shirt and tried it on. It was a bit big, and the arms were too long, but it felt amazing and he found himself touching his cuffs and his chest quite a lot when he wore it.

The day Sherlock returned, John felt many things. For a few moments he thought he was hallucinating, then he felt relief so profound his legs gave out. When Sherlock caught him, he felt certainty, and when he grabbed Sherlock's arms to hold himself up, he fell in love.

All things considered, it seemed a strange reaction; but John had never in his life wished for something to happen as badly as for Sherlock to somehow be alive; and, despite never having given him a reason to believe, Sherlock had survived and John loved it. He loved that he had come back to him, his hair shorter with telling grey streaks, his body even thinner, but stronger as well. His hands were rough and calloused against his wrists and the lines in his face deeper than they had been.

He had been the most beautiful thing John had ever seen.

There was no blood in his hair. His body wasn't broken, but spoke of hardship, of fight, of survival. His hands were warm and his eyes were wet with tears, a fact which Sherlock would never acknowledge now, if anybody made that claim. The silver green his eyes had been were now reflected in the colour of John's favourite scarf, though he had never told Sherlock why he had wanted that particular scarf so very badly.

The realisation that John loved Sherlock more than any other person he had ever met in his life gave way to astonishment; not about the fact that Sherlock had miraculously returned; but that he had returned to _him_.

Sherlock had asked for tea, and then John had sent him to bed before he could start explaining himself. Sherlock had been exhausted, and John really wanted him to stay; stay in his flat and prove his instinct right. He badly needed him to still be there in the morning, without having told him anything. He selfishly just wanted Sherlock, and not his motives to fill his grey flat with life and colour.

Sherlock reappeared from John's bedroom with a white t-shirt, which was a bit too short for him, but which still hung loosely on his shoulders, a pair of John's shorts and his own dressing gown. John had almost started to cry at the sight of him and Sherlock had wordlessly sat down on the small couch next to him and had pulled him into his arms.

John knew then that whatever Sherlock had experienced had not only changed his body, but it had changed his personality, too.

In the end John put Sherlock to bed, and when he had wanted to leave, Sherlock had asked him to stay. It seemed wrong not to turn off the light and crawl into bed with him.

Still, Sherlock hadn't explained. They hadn't touched, but John had woken up in the middle of the night, finding Sherlock looking at him with tired eyes. When he saw that he was awake, he smiled and pulled the duvet a bit higher, closing his eyes with a contented sigh.

John couldn't remember sleeping as well as he did that night.

When he woke up, he found the bed empty, but Sherlock was still there. He sat amongst bags which he had discovered downstairs and seemingly randomly opened, looking quite baffled. John chuckled and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. "So you found your clothes," he said, finding happiness take hold of him which seemed to make his heart burst.

Seeing Sherlock dressed in his old clothes was both funny and worrying. His trousers hung low on his hips and his shirts seemed much bigger. Only his socks seemed to fit as perfectly as always, which made John giggle. When Sherlock asked for the reason of his amusement, John simply told him that he was glad that he was back.

That was the first time Sherlock kissed him. It was entirely unexpected, but perfectly alright at the same time. Sherlock seemed a bit amazed by his own reaction, but then he shrugged and smiled a bit, wriggling his toes comfortably.

Eventually Sherlock told him; about Moriarty, about Moran, about the crumbling network, the sham, about France and Tibet and about the lack of news and the cold. A year later he would tell John that he had asked one of the homeless network to nick a t-shirt from the living room while John had been at work. John understood then why Sherlock hadn't reacted in any way when he had found that he had kept his dressing gown.

The kisses between them grew more frequent; and despite the fact that John was very much aware that he had never once thought of Sherlock in that way before he had _died_, he could not remember not loving him. It was complicated and very simple at the same time. He remembered feeling nervous or anxious, afraid of rejection and unfulfilled expectations at the beginnings of relationships, but with Sherlock he did not doubt once.

It took them months until the kisses became more until one day John got to know the other Sherlock Holmes. The one without his clothes on; and John had never loved Sherlock's clothes more. He loved them, because they proved that Sherlock was not scarily skinny anymore. They proved that two regular meals a day were not quite as bad for brainwork as Sherlock had wanted to make everyone and himself believe. They proved that John was doing a really good job taking care of him.

There were lines all over Sherlock's body. Imprints from his socks above his ankles. Imprints from his belt against his stomach. Slightly less visible were the lines his too tight shirt had left against his hips were it had been trapped between his skin and his belt and against his chest, where the buttons were now straining even harder. Long pink lines ran all the way from his hips to his knees where his trousers had been tight against his thighs and eventually there was the slightly wriggly imprint of his shorts when John pulled them away with care.

Against Sherlock's skin, his now shed clothes gave proof that Sherlock was alive. John had spent the better part of the next twenty minutes touching those lines; and the other lines on his skin which wrote Sherlock's history out against the tips of his fingers.


End file.
